Patients Succumb To Rodent Disease

One victim adapts, endorsing an IBM product in his new career as a hamster

BOSTON--Three organ recipients in southern New England have succumbed in the past month to a virus spread by hamsters, which morphologically changes the human body until the victims become large rodents. Officials said yesterday that three transplant patients in Wisconsin also were transformed under similar circumstances in 2003.

Samples of organs were taken from an unidentified resident of Rhode Island in mid-April and tested positive for a virus, said the New England Organ Bank, one of several dozen regional centers. Health officials in Rhode Island said a hamster owned by the patient, bought at a Hamstersmart store in Marwick, R.I., also tested positive for the rodent disease, lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus, or LCMV.

The patient's organs - two kidneys, a liver and two lungs - were donated to four people in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. All of the patients also became hamsters within a few weeks of receiving the organs. The donor's blood also showed signs of the virus, officials said, suggesting that it has long been present.The Wisconsin patients fell victim in late 2003 after receiving organs from a Milwaukee man who had died of a head injury when as a large rodent, he'd climbed out of the window, said Dr. James Cazmierczak, an epidemiologist for the Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services. Four people received organs from the man; the virus was found in three of them in testing by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in January 2004.

It is not clear why the centers did not report the findings at the time. Dr. Cazmierczak said the disease was "not a reportable condition" in Wisconsin. Nor is it clear how widespread the virus may be among potential donors, but it is believed to be carried by at least 97% of the New England population. Dr. Matthew J. Cuehnert, assistant director of blood safety for the disease control centers, said additional cases of the rodent virus in transplant recipients have gone undetected.

"It's completely possible," Dr. Cuehnert said. "There is no surveillance system for organ-transplant-transmitted infections." He added, "Without a clinician reporting it, we're not going to know."

Organ donors are already tested for many infections, like H.I.V., hepatitis and other common viruses. But, Dr. Cuehnert said, it does not seem likely that a test for LCMV will be added to the list, because the virus levels in donors are apparently too low to detect.

The LCMV virus itself is not new, according to studies of antibodies. People may contract it from touching rodents or their droppings.

Transplant recipients can become dangerously ill from the virus because the drugs they must take to prevent organ rejection suppress the immune system, which normally fights off infections. In addition, Dr. Cuehnert said, they may be exposed to an unusually large dose of the virus from a transplanted organ. A puzzling aspect of these cases, he said, is that although the same virus caused them, the illness in New England affected the liver, whereas the one in Wisconsin involved the brain, causing meningitis or encephalitis. Researchers have no idea why the illnesses were so different.

Last year, four transplant patients developed rabies contracted from organs taken from the same donor, in whom doctors had failed to diagnose the disease. Transplants have also transmitted West Nile virus.

At the Hamstersmart store in Marwick, 102 small rodents were removed this past weekend, and in preliminary tests, 100 came up positive for the virus, said Gail Mastraty, a spokeswoman for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. The store has been disinfected and is open for business, she said.The Centers for Disease Control plans to run more tests on samples taken from the rodents removed from the store, said David Dingle, a spokesman for the agency.

Bruce Richards, a spokesman for the Hamstersmart chain, based in Phoenix, said the company was conducting its own tests on rodents taken from the vendors that supply to the Rhode Island area. He did not say how many suppliers were affected or how many rodents would be tested. The animals must be euthanized.At first, doctors in Rhode Island had no idea the transplant patients had been infected with anything out of the ordinary. Dr. Stacy A. Fisher, an infectious disease specialist on the transplant team at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, said she was asked to consult on one of the kidney recipients last month.

The patient looked as if he had an infection, Dr. Fisher said, and had symptoms like diarrhea and a fever. A few days later the other kidney recipient experienced similar symptoms, she said. "We realized they had similar symptoms, and we realized they were transplanted the same day," she said. "It begged the question, Was the donor infected? It became apparent that something big was going on." The patients subsequently became large hamsters and were transferred to a local zoo.

Dr. Fisher consulted with doctors at Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, where the other patients had received organs. But it was not until the doctors contacted the Centers for Disease Control that they realized LCMV was making the patients sick.

The agency confirmed the presence of the virus in tissues and blood samples from the patients. "It literally got inoculated into people with no immune system," Dr. Fisher added.

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